The Special Issue on Multimedia Networking for Electronic Commerce Systems has been published online

Electronic Commerce Research (Springer)

Guest Editors: C. Grecos,T. Dagiuklas, M. Fleury, D. Kanellopoulos

This special issue is composed of 3 referred papers covering such topics as electronic souvenir appification (for smartphones and tablets), variable video coding for peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming, and effective P2P Internet Protocol television (IPTV) digital rights management architectures. The issue sets out to demonstrate pioneer work in this field, investigate novel solutions and methods for services design and discuss future trends in this field.

The papers in this special issue

Recently, Appification has been introduced to describe the rapidly widening shift from web browsing to the usage of smartphone applications for Internet-based information access and e-services consumption. The first paper, “E-souvenir Appification: QoS Web based Media Delivery for Museum Apps” by Evangelos Sakkopoulos, Mersini Paschou, Yannis Panagis, Dimitris Kanellopoulos, Georgios Eftaxias and Athanasios Tsakalidis, presents a solution that introduces e-souvenir (digital souvenir) by extending the appification of e-shopping and shopping (non electronic) souvenirs while visiting cultural sights (e.g. museums, exhibitions etc). The proposed smartphone app increases a user’s involvement in order to personalize the App with his/her choices while sightseeing, and thus it forms an electronic souvenir. The proposed approach introduces intelligent QoS enabled features to the cultural smartphone App to improve the user’s experience. In addition, the authors facilitate efficient QoS-based media delivery for the e-souvenir solution in order to make it efficient to operate under heavy network traffic load and best-effort Internet-based connections.

The second paper, “How Variable Bitrate Video Formats Can Help P2P Streaming Boost its Reliability and Scale” by Marat Zhanikeev, analyzes and compares performance among several peer-to-peer (P2P) methods using simulation tools. Further, it presents a P2P delivery model that allows video content providers to run services globally without procuring local facilities in several countries. The paper also discusses the application of the proposed model in electronic commerce

Currently, IPTV services are deployed in a P2P architecture to achieve scalability. In the light of this situation, the intellectual property rights of valuable IPTV content distributed over P2P networks must be considered. Definitely, an important issue is to effectively apply Digital Rights Management (DRM) for P2P IPTV services. The third paper, “A Cost-Effective Key Distribution of P2P IPTV DRM over Opportunistic Multicast Overlay for e-Commerce Systems” by Ray-I Chang, Tsao-Ta Wei, and Chia-Hui Wang, presents an effective P2P IPTV DRM architecture for e-Commerce systems. The proposed architecture is based on the standards from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). In addition, the authors propose a cost-effective key distribution mechanism with leverage between DRM protection strength and system/network load. The proposed mechanism can improve DRM frameworks for P2P IPTV applications in e-Commerce systems on the opportunistic multicast overlay to overcome peer churn arising from leaving and joining peers.